Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @11:45AM
from the where-am-i dept.

miradu writes "Many Slashdot users may remember that the winner of last year's Google programming contest's entry was a location specific search. Now, Google has made a version of Daniel's idea available to use on Google Labs. Google Search By Location lets you search for things near some zipcode, or city/state. It then gives you a map with each search result pinned on it. V"

Is google going to eventually require some kind of stripped down registration for this service? They've slowly (over the past year or so), started to roll out a pervasive registration for their various services (Adsense, Adwords), and optional registration would make sense here too.

On the other side of things, Google stands to make a killing here. Google can sell a new class of ads to people like plumbers, who don't need a webpage. In fact, they could possibly host a minimal web page for those kind of advertisers who just want to show some simple text and services.

You have an excellent idea. Beyond plumbers, electricians, contractors, and even grocery stores and pharmacies could advertise like this if it wasn't too expensive. But asking for an idea fee...well, I think there'll be some outdoor ice skating in the middle of the rain forest before we see the fee paid.

This is a wonderful idea. Sites like Yahoo [yahoo.com] already have Yellow Pages [yahoo.com] that do similar things. Hopefully Google [google.com] can make it even better. I definitely believe MapQuest [mapquest.com] is a big improvement over Yahoo Maps [yahoo.com]. Nice to see that Google has started out small (just search engine), made their services FAR better than any competitor, and are now, finally, expanding.

Don't feel bad. I live in Northern Virginia, where about two-thirds of all roads are named "Glebe". There's North, South, East, and West Glebe Road. North Glebe runs roughly north, while South Glebe runs east-west. West Glebe goes south, and is south of South Glebe. All of them have different route numbers, and the route numbers change.

D.C. has this, but they have it from E to W. Then for N and S they have letters. For example, there is a N. D street and a S. D street. Once, before I realized the implications of this, I was looking for something at I and 3rd. Unfortunately I forgot which ones... And, as ususal, I was late.

It is an online yellow pages. Each listed company has a small 'web-page' that provides a link to the actual external web-page, if available, as well as a mapquest map, address and main contact phone number.

I use that site ALL the time looking up potential service vendors for the company I work for.

And we are soon to start seeking businesses to be listed at www.gonumber.net. Some initial customers can be seen at GoNumber.net/hot [gonumber.net]. The major upgrade we are working on is based on Open Source too and will offer the kind of affordable location based listings small businesses desire - photos included.

Since it's still in the labs, it's still an experimental project. They may eventually abandon the idea, or they may take it mainstream. Google News started out with a US-centric version, and has since expanded to cover a number of other countries.

It's still just a try - you can't see it on the usual Google search page (like you can see web, groups, images, news..), it's in the Labs at the moment. And I guess the group of people willing to try it out, to test it, is large enough.

The logic that fishes addresses out of web pages might not be as flexible as you think. There might be quite a lot of work involved in making it work for different places in the US. Each other nation may require a lot of customization as well.

Sometimes it decides on its own to break for a nice pot of Earl Grey and some fresh silicon wafers. We'll keep it running as much as possible, but please bear with us as we work to make it faster and more reliable.

At first, I thought this was going to function by mapping the web server IP address to a geological location. This is much better. It is a logical extension from the feature where Google gives you street addresses when you search on business, etc. This could be really useful for finding local clubs and organizations that share a common interest.

Well, no I don't think it would be more elegant. Latitude and longitude tell you where something is located, it doesn't tell you how to get there. "On Adams street, just north of McAlister", will always be more usefull to humans than 35.31234' N 108.47343' W (and we would need that many decimal places). That, however, does not mean that the underlying implementation can't use lat, long.

Would it be more effective for a small business that depends on local business (such as a house roofing or a plumbing company) to have a business name and a website that includes the name of the city? For example, "www.dallasplumbing.com" or www.dallas-plumbing.com? Which would be better at getting higher up in the google query? It would seem that with this IP location factor in the query that maybe such a URL scheme would be effective? Your opinions, please.....

What next, Google-RIAA search; 'enter a kazaa username and google will give you the IP address, personal information, credit card number, and home address of the user!'

or, using google-patriot act search, type in a person's name, and you get all the secret cameras in their home, their entire geneology, pictures from their past, and other weird things that only the conspiracy theorists know...

Or, even better, using google for moms, a google that scans the computer for cookies to find out what site her kid has been visiting via a cookie scan or something.

I dunno, but eventually it's going to seem like an invasion of privacy with these search engines, but then again, once you put something online without any protection, it *is* public domain.

Well from what I can tell it doesn't just look in the yellow pages. For example I think I could do a search for linux, and it would display any addresses in my area that appeared on a linux website. Or I could search for the words "sale", and "shoes".

Unfortunately, I was about to try some searches to see what other usefull things it could do other than yellow pages searches, when the site came to grinding halt. Sure enough, the story had just made the front page for non subscribers:)

I wonder if it's because the feature needs performance tuning, or if it simply hasn't been deployed to handle a Slashdotting's worth of load yet.

Either way, I'm sure it'll be a learning experience for the project team.

Given Google's amazing general search capability, though, I won't be prepared to call this new Location feature a comparable success until I can search for "winning lottery ticket" near my zip code and get driving directions...

That would be a trip.
I tried the search and it failed on my quite a few times, but the potential is huge. The first thing that came to my mind was real estate.
I've gone out looking for land with realtors that can't even find the lots they're supposed to be showing, and look how much they take in transaction fees for their "service." It' not like they do the Escrow themselves. I suppose it's a bit different for houses, but for land sales they act like they're doing you a favor.
Not only that, but I've gone in with aerial photos and maps from the County that all come off of county maintained computer databases and the realtors inevitably insist their little hand drawn map that doesn't even accurately map the parcels is the more accurate solution.
This could be the beginning of something huge for Google.

It probably is running on some kind of cluster. They're trying to get it up to production strength, and there wouldn't be much point in a public beta if they still haven't made it clusterable (ie scalable).

Of course, you're right, that doesn't mean it's scaled. It's likely on ten machines, not a few thousand.

Multimap is truly awesome... I started using it when I planned my trip to Ireland/England back in 2001. I really like the aerial map overlay feature... Using that, I was able to memorize what certain parts of London would look like, which allowed me to find my way around often times without a map. It was a weird feeling being able to find my way around without having been there before.:^)

I searched for "used video games" and "Raleigh, NC" and the first ten results are about anything but video games. Try it for yourself [google.com], and figure out why the Teachers.Net trade show is listed.

I wonder how they will be enforcing the zip code registration. The main drive behind google and the page rank thing was to take search engine optimization off the page and out of the hands of the web master so as to avoid keyword stuffing and not-quite-honest optimization techniques.

But it seems sort of hard to determine the "location" of a website without input from the people behind the site. There are possibilities for abuse.

But maybe there's no incentive to be listed in the wrong zip code... well, maybe there is.

If you do a lot of business on the web or by mail, and your physical location doesn't matter, you might post 100 versions of your site, each with the zip code of a large metropolitan area. But then how many people would do that?

If you do a lot of business on the web or by mail, and your physical location doesn't matter, you might post 100 versions of your site, each with the zip code of a large metropolitan area. But then how many people would do that?

Far too many. It's already rampant on job sites where you can search by location. Those annoying link-portal sites will also offer "localized exposure" services or some other buzzphrase.

Here's a (hopefully) non-slashdotted site that does the same thing although it only works in San Diego. SDcommunities.net [sdcommunities.net]
I got the latitude and longitude data from the Census for zip codes and created a HUGE reference tables for the distances between zip codes. Lots of math in the search code.

http://www.superpages.com/ came out with mapbased search that uses an Applet a while back. And for those who remember Mapquest use to offer a similar feature back in the 90's. Google is a little late to the game. The application itself isn't all that hard to build. The real trick is providing a way for listees to correct the gps coordinates. For those familiar with GIS, that is the biggest problems. To my knowledge, VeriZon offers that capability to listees. You can easily test the accuracy of Goecodes by d

That's a great way to spend effort. I'm glad Google is concentrating on that rather than on making their search engine usable once again.

The day they figure out a way to stop the keyword spammers will be a very, very good day for the Internet as a whole. Location targetted searching... er.. yawn.. any business out there that wants us to visit already has their city on their website anyways.

Slashdot seems to be very pro-Google, and I admit to using their search the majority of the time as well, but everyone should at least take a glance at google watch [google-watch.org]. Of most interest is the privacy section. If any other site were to track the stuff Google does,/. would be up in arms protesting.

"Google currently does not allow outsiders to gain access to raw data because of privacy concerns. Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly -- Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, face lifts. What is interesting in the aggregate can seem an invasion of privacy if narrowed to an individual."

Please note, this isn't a troll, and I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat (maybe I should?). Imagine the following scenario: a bomb goes off in the US. By tracing searches for "anarchist cookbook" to zipcodes within the area of the bomb blast, the FBI could have access to information that makes TIA look like a better alternative.

I think the difference could be that Google collects the data not for the standard "we are keeping the server logs for security" but more as a future business opportunity or in case they can construct some new search options. They can collect enormous amounts of data no one else can collect. Some day they might sell accsess to "trusted partners" that can mine the data.
Don't blame them, after all they can earn huge amounts of money on this, but that does not mean that we should not be worried.

90% of the complaints on Google-Watch are from "search engine optimizers."

That is, people are upset that they can't manipulate listings on Google for money. (Hint: Buy a fucking ad.) Forgive me if that makes me want to ignore Google-Watch.

Google's privacy policy is well defined. If you've got a problem with it, holler. Your scenario would pretty clearly violate their policy. If you've got some other way that they should do their business without losing features, holler.

If it's just web logs, then while do they need that cookie on your computer with the unique ID and an expiry set to 2038?

I can understand tracking search terms, but not when those searches are correlated to a unique cookie ID. What value is it to google be able to answer the question "what searches did the computer with cookie ID XYZ perform?" I don't think you'll find an answer to that question that doesn't make you want to buy reams of tin foil.

How does Google search by location work? Google search by location takes a new approach to helping users find geographic information on the web. For this experiment, we've done something new by analyzing the entire content of a page to extract hints or, what we call "signals," about the geographic nature of a page. From this information, Google determines the corresponding physical location and returns results that match the geographic range you specify (e.g., "nea

Google gives good search results except when the law tells them not to -- and even then, they give you a link telling you that results were removed, and why.

Google self-censors already, anyway -- by altering their PageLink algorithm when certain dishonest sites try rigging Google's system for better page results. This sort of self-censorship is a Good Thing.

If you want a completely "open" search engine, you're probably going to keep looking. Other engines are increasingly giving into advertising boosting search results, and probably nobody has the breadth and depth of Google's database. You might not like the fact that they have to comply with the law in order to keep returning results at all, but believe me, they don't like it either, and they do all they can to remain honest.

...they linked to the subpoena stating that they couldn't link to said site. Which is about as much as I'd expect them to do. At least you know they're being censored, and can dispute it. I really don't expect Google as a business to get involved in a long and costly lawsuit over the legality of linking. Particularly when the "censoring" only makes it more interesting and popular, and they can laugh at whoever tried to censor it in the first place...

My main concern is that the 3 examples given were shoddy "censorship". What about other censorships done by Google that we havent been informed.

The thougt I'm trying to convey is that "everybody" uses google. Because they control what sites 'exist', they can make sites disappear. It's sort of like controlling somebodys language. If they dont know the word to convey something, how can they describe it? That's what Orwell was worried about.